If prices per unit were easy to see, would it change the way you shop? | Canada Voices

My recent attempt to buy Canadian over a year into the U.S. trade war left me fixating on something else at my neighbourhood grocer: unit pricing.

It’s not that I didn’t appreciate it before. The opposite, in fact.

While visiting Britain recently, I was struck by the crisp, easy-to-read unit price labels displayed on store shelves. They helped me choose the best-value pack of ramen to devour between connecting flights, but could equally help select from a half-a-dozen detergents, all promising to be toughest on stains.

That’s what made my experience back home that much more frustrating. In Canada, the practice of displaying the cost of a product per a standardized metric – 100 grams, a kilo, one litre – is only mandated by law in Quebec. In other regions, retailers can choose to do this at their whim, though with consumers and advocates vocally pushing for it, many do.

But without clear rules on when or how to display unit pricing, a tool meant to help shoppers save can add up to barely visible scrawl.

I tried to buy Canadian (again)

That might start to change. Last week, the Manitoba government announced it was considering legislation to introduce standardized unit pricing as part of broader efforts to tackle food affordability.

In its Grocery Price Study, the province cited CPI data showing that the cost of food staples such as meat, preserved vegetables and eggs rose between 5.2 per cent and 6 per cent a year on average in the period spanning 2020 to 2025. Beyond helping shoppers find better value, the report identified standardized unit pricing as a way to spot shrinkflation and improve competition.

The European Union, Australia, New Zealand and Britain are just a few of the places that have already implemented rules around this.

In parts of the EU and Britain, mandates on unit pricing for food were expanded in 2025 to include items such as cosmetics, cleaning and hygiene products and even some building materials.

Though implementation can vary slightly by country, the rules generally apply to brick-and-mortar stores, vending machines and e-commerce storefronts alike. They also mandate that retailers ensure unit price information is “unambiguous, easily identifiable and clearly legible.” In the EU, penalties for non-compliance can be as high as 4 per cent of a business’s annual turnover or €2-million ($3.2-million).

The rules carve out some exceptions for small and independent players. In Canada, retailers have often argued that implementing harmonized unit pricing was time-consuming and expensive, putting the most pressure on the small guys, without saving shoppers money.

To be fair, the evidence on consumer benefits is somewhat mixed. One study out of Macquarie University in Australia, for example, showed that 60 per cent of respondents said per-unit price was one of the factors they paid most attention to when it was available, with 57 per cent choosing the lowest-price item option. Another study however found that participants often claimed to rely on unit pricing display even when it wasn’t there to begin with.

Shrinkflation has not gone away – but it’s shapeshifting and manifesting in new ways

The benefit of harmonized unit pricing also seem to vary by product. In a 2024 report summary, Britain’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) found that shoppers used the mandated information the most when comparing cupboard essentials, cleaning products or certain “substantial” purchases such as olive oil, but not things they saw as treats.

Instead of helping shoppers spend less, there’s also evidence that those who paid attention to per-unit prices redirected any savings back into that week’s grocery budget.

But what most seem to agree on is that visibility and awareness matter. Researchers at Queensland University of Technology, for example, found that a family of four could save between 11 and 18 per cent annually (about 1,700 Australian dollars in 2016, and likely substantially more today) on their grocery run by relying on per-unit price displays.

So what’s been found to actually help the most? You guessed it: prominent, legible, well-placed per-unit pricing information, which was found to increase awareness and usage across multiple studies (albeit, with less cost-conscious consumers seeing the biggest spikes).

Even in Britain, where rules already exist, the CMA in 2023 recommended improving legibility and placement requirements, finding that shoppers’ ability and willingness to use unit pricing depended on how visible and how well displayed the numbers were.

While I can’t say for sure how much I’d save long-term with easier access to this sort of information, I know it won’t make a difference if I need a magnifying glass to read the numbers.

Do you pay attention to unit pricing at the grocery store? Drop me a line at mpostelnyak@globeandmail.com.

Chart of the day

Here’s a chart that looks at two retirement ages: the one Canada set and the one Canadians use. It finds that our retirement age has not increased in 99 years. Should it?